Creative Gainesville: Irene Salley's life in living color

Saturday

Feb 4, 2017 at 12:01 AM

For painter, travels, family and an eye for detail have inspired her luminous work.

Photos and story by Rachel Damiani

Iréne Salley, an oil painter, walks barefoot through her lush garden in Northwest Gainesville. She wears a paint-stained sundress and a wide-brimmed hat. As she names the flora she has planted, Salley’s voice rises in excitement, like birds bursting into song around her.

“My garden is my inspiration,” Salley says.

Some of her inspired landscape paintings adorn the walls of her studio, which is tucked deep within her garden. Other paintings have been displayed at a variety of galleries, including the Thomas Center and Bellamy Road Fine Art Gallery in Melrose.

As an expressionist painter, Salley says she strives to capture on canvas the feeling a place evokes within her, focusing on what resonates with her. In her paintings of her garden, for example, the face of a flower may dwarf a pine tree. She conveys her awe of nature’s beauty through fervent brush strokes and carefully chosen color.

“I use color to express my feelings to the landscape,” Salley says. “That’s why my paintings are so colorful. It’s because color is my tool.”

The colors of the flowers in Salley’s garden, including bright purples, reds, oranges and blues, are often the focal point in her oil paintings. Their hues radiate from the center of the flowers and mingle with the blue of the sky and the green of the forest.

Like her paintings, Salley’s life also has been full of color. Her childhood was spent on a sugarcane plantation on the island of Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies. At age 29, she moved to Paris where she developed a love for art and fashion, and worked as a real estate agent and model. At 36, she joined a sister in Connecticut and opened a shop that sold French products. Then, at age 40, she moved to Gainesville where she began taking art classes at Santa Fe Community College.

Today, at age 69, Salley retains a youthful spirit.

“I feel 40,” she exclaims, as she tilts her head back and laughs.

Early Life in Guadeloupe

“I grew up in a place where love was very important,” Salley says, of her childhood in Guadeloupe, where she was reared in a family of five children. “Because it’s large families and because it’s an island, everybody is together all the time.”

Guadeloupe is part of a broader island arc, the Lesser Antilles, snugly situated between tectonic plates in the Caribbean Sea and prone to volcanic eruptions. Salley, like the land she lived on, had a fiery nature as a child.

In school, she frequently ended up at in trouble for her latest prank. One time, she hid underneath the teacher’s desk and made faces at the other students during instruction, Salley recalls, laughing.

Outside of school, she was equally fearless and wild.

“I dirtied my clothes. I ate raw fish,” she says. “I was crazy.”

Her father, who owned a rum distillery, loved horses and had a stable on his property. Some of Salley’s earliest memories are of exploring the horse stables.

Even as a young child, Salley enjoyed observing the horses and the landscape around her. She says she was curious about the textures of different objects, including fruit and freshly plowed soil. Salley dabbled in art, but says her family discouraged her attempts because they did not want her to be vain.

“It’s not like now. A child draws a sun and you go, ‘Oh my God! It’s so beautiful,’ and you frame it. It’s not like that.”

Salley put aside her artistic interests when she married at 19. At 20, she had her first child, Daniel. At 22, her daughter Florence was born, followed by another girl, Ludivine, at 26.

At 29, Salley and her husband divorced. That’s when she made her first move, to Paris, where her children were in boarding school.

“I wanted to be with my kids, so there was no fear,” Salley says.

Celebrating life in Paris

To make ends meet for her young family, Salley worked multiple jobs as a model and seller for Estrada, a German-based fashion company, and as a real estate agent.

Once she developed connections in Paris, Salley also worked as an interior designer, where she honed some of her artistic skills.

Even without an abundance of money, Sally says, the family celebrated and embraced life in Paris. They took day trips by train, explored the city by Vespa and enjoyed picnics in the parks.

During visits to Paris’ museums with her children, Salley rediscovered her interest in art, she says.

“We were very happy, the children and I,” Salley says.

But the one downside was the gray skies.

“After living the gray of Paris, it was starting to get on me, the gray buildings, the gray sky,” Salley says. “I was starting to suffocate.”

So after seven years there, Salley moved her family to Connecticut, after her older sister, Maryse, raved about it.

Self-reliant in Connecticut

After moving to Bristol, Connecticut, Salley opened Natural, a face cream store that sold French products.

But the move was not without some cultural adjustment.

“Connecticut was the opposite of everything that I had known,” Salley says. “They did not celebrate life the way that I was used to. They did not see life the way that I saw life. Life was stern and rigid.

“I never understood why they asked me about my religion and what did I do because I was thinking, I’m not what I do. What does my religion have to do with who I am?” she says.

In this very different place, Irene said she became even closer with her children. Her youngest daughter, Ludivine, says she recalls laughter and joy around the family dinner table.

While in Connecticut, Salley’s oldest two children graduated from high school. Daniel attended college in Florida, while Florence moved to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design.

As the house grew emptier, Salley decided it was time for a move of her own.

After four years in Connecticut, Salley and Ludivine packed up their light burgundy Oldsmobile and journeyed south. At the time, Salley’s two younger siblings were attending the University of Florida and her family owned a house here. Salley and Ludivine settled in Gainesville.

Growing in Gainesville

Salley worked part time in a furniture store drawing cabinets and enrolled in at Santa Fe Community College to study interior design. In the course of her studies, she gained an influential mentor, the late Lenny Kesl, a well-known artist who died in 2012, who fostered Salley’s passion for painting.

“He would comment on my paintings and say, burn this one, or this one is good,” Salley says. “He was a good mentor.”

Under his auspices, Salley grew as a painter and realized her preferred medium of oil paints. Unlike acrylics, she said oil paints do not dry quickly, allowing her to actively work and re-work her piece.

“I’m always covered with paint,” Salley says. “I like the texture and I like to touch it. I think the sensuality of the matter is very important to me.”

Salley also is hands-on in her home’s garden. When she and her second husband, Craig Salley, first moved into their house, Salley longed for the bright island colors of her childhood and the pops of flowers from French gardens. She began her garden with an idealistic vision, sowing seeds native to her past.

She found the Florida climate and soil unconducive to growing the plants of her island childhood, so she switched to flora native to Florida.

“It doesn’t have to be a fight,” Salley says. “It has to be fluid. I don’t want to fight with the garden because I tried that and it doesn’t work.”

Salley, too, has adjusted to the soil beneath her feet. After her divorce from Craig Salley, she started a business buying, renovating and leasing properties in Gainesville.

Ludivine Kail, her youngest daughter, an interior designer who lives near her mother, says her mom taught her to be independent and she is her role model.

“She really showed us we could do anything,” Kail says.

Salley loves cooking, spending time with her daughter and close friends, hosting parties and dancing. And she has rekindled her childhood love of riding horses.

For the first time, she has begun painting horses instead of landscapes.

“For me, horses are special,” Salley says. “They have fragility, sensitivity. They are very intuitive.”

In her paintings, she emphasizes a horse’s eyelashes, the curve of its belly, or the black eyes, as she strives to convey a horse’s energy.

Although Salley misses the colors and texture of Guadeloupe and the vibrancy and celebration in Paris, she says she has found her home in Gainesville, where she has grown as a person and an artist.

“I have the freedom to know and finally understood that paint is no big deal. It's just paint on a canvas and you can burn a canvas,” Salley says. “You can destroy it. You can do anything that you want.”